Nothing lasts forever. Not even political parties.
A century ago the Liberal Party, on entering 1924, was still one of the two dominant forces in politics, though the party had in 1922 lost its governing role to the Conservatives. By the end of the decade, in a mere six years, the Labour Party had supplanted it as the main opposition party to the Tories and the Liberals were entering their long decline.
In a first-past-the-post electoral system there are, by definition, only two main parties. They are not always going to be the same, though. No sensible Liberal leader is going to say to his troops, as David Steel did in 1981 in Llandudno, “go back to your constituencies and prepare for government”.
(Though the rest of his speech is oddly enough worth rereading. It has dated well, despite the references to Brezhnev and Reagan.)
Polling: Labour landslide predicted
Some recent research published in The Guardian using data from Electoral Calculus confirms something I had long suspected. Fairly obviously, if the country votes the way the polls still suggest it will, and taking into account the emergence of Reform UK, the old UKIP, to stand against the Tories and split their vote, the number of Conservative MPs could fall to as low as 125.
But the real significance of the piece is that the survivors will, to a large extent, be drawn from the extreme right of the party, providing as much as 40% of MPs on the above analysis. Many will come from groupings such as the New Conservatives and the European Research Group.
Incidentally the New Conservatives, a truly weird and unappealing Tory splinter group, provided that MP for Bury North who managed a degree of self-publicity recently when he said children who were struggling there were the result of “crap parents”. James Daly’s majority at the 2019 election was, er, 105, so he is unlikely to be troubling us much after the next one. Others of his groupuscule, which includes Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates, may be more successful.
Reform splitting the right-wing vote
Reform UK has indeed said it will not do a deal with the hated Tories, which it regards as weak on immigration and tax cuts. The party, boosted by Nigel Farage’s higher profile after appearing on some reality TV programme or other, will not win any seats. But it will, by any analysis, make even more Tory seats marginal.
So, the scenario, assuming an overwhelming Labour victory at the next election – best bet now May 2, to coincide with local elections which would help get the party activists out onto the streets and after a tax-cutting Budget, though that could change again – is a Conservative Party that has lurched even further to the right.
Once Sunak has slunk off to Silicon Valley to make even more money he doesn’t need, the party faithful, traditionally more right-wing than Tory MPs generally even now, will elect a hard right, populist leader. As the Guardian piece points out, Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman have majorities so large that even under the worst-case scenario they would survive.
Conservatives losing their primary demographic
A hard right party with 120 seats and a hard right leader? Not the best scenario for entering opposition or the run-up to the next election. The demographics are not exactly on their side. According to a YouGov poll in September, just 1% of 18–24-year-olds plan to vote Conservative at the next election.
Meanwhile, putting it as delicately as possible, the number of Tory voters at the other end of the age scale is perforce diminishing. In the middle, there is evidence that young voters are not becoming more conservative as they age, as received political wisdom has always had it.
This makes logical sense. The acquisition of property, and a relatively wealthier lifestyle, as we age might tend to propel voters to the right, as they try to preserve this. Millennials are less likely to enjoy that greater prosperity, for all the obvious reasons.
History repeating itself?
So a hard right Tory party losing votes at one end of the age range and failing to pick them up from younger voters? The election after next – 2029 presumably – could be even worse for them. It looks awfully like the Liberals a century ago, a formerly dominant political party that becomes electorally irrelevant.
History repeats itself. Labour replaced the Liberals because it was seen as a more radical alternative to the Tories. What would replace the Conservative Party as the second force? Presumably, given all the above, a centre-right coalition giving erstwhile Tory voters a genuine alternative, led by some of those Tories forced out of the party, or disaffected: Anna Soubry, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Amber Rudd, Rory Stewart – there are plenty of them.
Admittedly the last time a new centrist party was tried, the so-called Change UK founded by Labour dissidents with a few Tories, it went very badly indeed. But they were up against Labour, led by Jeremy Corbyn, and the electoral force that was Boris Johnson. Next time it could be different. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
